When you look at the above photo, what do you think? Excess? Waste? Understandable. We associate things like explosions and helicopters with big budget Hollywood films where waste isn’t a word studios seem to know exists. Believe it or not, our budget for this video (not counting the camera rental itself) was in the $150-$200 range when it was all said and done. Let me walk you through our entire weekend of filming and how we went about utilizing our resources to maximize production value.

One of the things that did concern me slightly about the FS700 was how would the sensor behave in Super slow Mo. The sensor is a CMOS sensor, so I expected it to exhibit rolling shutter artefacts, which it it does indeed do when in standard shooting modes and S&Q motion. It’s not bad, but you can make the pictures skew and when you try to shooting something like a spinning propellor you can get some weird effects, especially at higher shutter speeds.

You never know where an interesting project can come from — a friend, a client or even from Twitter. Such was the case for Boston-based DP Todd Mahoney, who spent ten days documenting the progress of The Solar Odyssey Project after seeing a tweet looking for someone to sub for their regular d.p. The Solar Odyssey is an attempt to cover the waterways of “The Great Loop” in a solar-powered boat. The project is led by skipper and adventurer Jim Greer, and technologist and host Philip Hodgetts.

It was the first project I had done using the Canon 5D Mark II, the Sony FS100, and GoPro cameras in a multicam setup. I was delighted to see how the footage from the 5D and FS100 worked together in spite of the bad lighting. On that KSO shoot the stage lighting was continually changing, including going dark as some points!

I’ve been shooting on Canon DSLR’s for the last couple of years. When I first realised what these cameras could do, I couldn’t believe my luck. A cinematic film look hidden inside a camera designed to take photos? And all for an outrageously low price? Amazing.

After spending a few years directing and shooting content with the new wave of HD DSLRs I was excited by the launch of the NEX-FS100 and the serious advantages it offered over both DSLR and 2/3” chip ENG cameras and the like. So when I started working for EMC in their marketing department a NEX-FS100 was top of the shopping list and it did not disappoint.

After my last blog post a few readers wanted to know if the image quailty of the NEX FS700 could be improved by recording to an external HD SDI recorder. Well in short the answer at the moment seems to be no. Sony have said the camera will be capable of outputting a 4K 12bit RAW image at some point in the future but sadly it only outputs 8 bit 4:2:2 over the HD SDI output at the moment.

I received my production model Sony NEX FS700 this week and was very keen to test out its low light capabilities. Before all the critics start and I get bombarded with emails asking why I did this and why I didn’t do that, please let me state that what I did here is not a very scientific test. I did it solely to see how the three cameras I own look and compare to each other.

When Sony dropped off the new FS700 at AbelCine for some quick tests, we put it to work right away. We wanted to test many things, but focused on low-light performance, dynamic range, and the camera’s slow-motion options. The FS700 is an updated model of the FS100, so much of our testing also compared these two cameras.

I’ve been hearing people say that the Sony FS700 is too “videoish”. I recently shot a short action film which was my first chance to really test out the FS700. Each scene was lit and setup as you would any true film. In these scenarios I was really blown away by the image from the FS700. Coming from a Canon 5D MkII, the FS700′s codec held up so much better while still having a ton more dynamic range.

This is some of the best indie modding work I’ve ever seen. Best of all it comes from my home… England!! It essentially turns the tiny toy-like NEX 5N into a mini Red. Advantages include a secure full sized HDMI port, cooling system, integrated Sony monitor, robust build quality, better handling and protection for the camera itself from drops, etc. As you can see, looks wise it is quite an eye opener too, turning the NEX 5N into something much closer to a digital cinema camera.

First inital reaction is Yes. Footage looks very good and looks easy enough to match to the F3. All footage shot to a PIX240 in Prores 422HQ. Both cameras are white balanced in the Key light. Both read 3000K, but there is a distinct difference in the red wall. Both cameras are shot in STANDARD out-of-the-box-setting. One camera comes very close to the actual color of the wall and that is…… the FS700.

We were very excited to get our hands on the Sony NEX FS700U. We put it through it's paces and showcase some of the cool new features of this awesome camera including the built-in ND filters, and the super-slow motion at several frame rates.

The NEX-VG20 is Sony’s latest experiment in the melding of two distinct product lines: the Handycam camcorder and the NEX series of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras. Yup, that’s right, the VG20 is a hybrid camera/camcorder device in the most basic sense of the term, but this one of those cheesy hybrids that’s having an identity crisis (we’re looking at you JVC PX10). No, the NEX-VG20 is a serious camcorder that is designed with specifically with videography in mind. But its guts are taken directly from Sony’s NEX camera line, featuring a particular similarity to the Sony NEX-5N camera.

If you’ve seen other Color Grading tools like DaVinci Resolve or Apple’s Color, then SpeedGrade will seem somewhat similar with it’s primary and secondary layers, color scopes and three-way color corrector. It’s also different in that it doesn’t have some of the unusual interface elements; like the nodes for organizing effects in Resolve.

Sorry guys for the long video, but I had the chance to review the FS700 and there are a number of things I thought of when I went over the camer that I liked and thought of when I was reviewing it. Obviously if you have any questions about orkflow in the 4k I will let you know when I do, but this is definitely one camera I will own! Here are a few key points I noticed after using a pre-production model.

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